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Conversations among Canadian conservatives often drift into grumbling about the courts. Their complaint is with the judiciary’s decades-long campaign to remake the country in its progressive image, a process that began soon after adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982....

Veissiere and Carr are among researchers and public figures calling attention not just to the more widely discussed impacts of our phones — such as dinner disruptions and distracted drivers — but also to their subtler effects, which some fear could result in profound changes to our brains and to society.

Those recommendations were all included in Relationships Matter for Youth “Aging Out” of Care, a report from Melanie Doucet, a McGill University social work PhD student, and eight youth from care in B.C.

Ground zero in the global battle against climate chaos this week is in Wet'suwet'en territory, northern British Columbia. As pipeline companies try to push their way onto unceded Indigenous territories, the conflict could become the next Standing Rock-style showdown over Indigenous rights and fossil fuel infrastructure.

…Investigators in the field say the critique is premature: the science is still young and feeling its way forward. Studies in mice, in particular, have been offered as evidence of such trauma-transmission, and as a model for studying the mechanisms. “The effects we’ve found have been small but remarkably consistent, and significant,” said Moshe Szyf, a professor of pharmacology at McGill University. “This is the way science works....

But black holes aren’t quite as menacing as they are commonly portrayed. “They definitely do not suck,” says Daryl Haggard, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal. “A black hole just sits there, passively. Things can fall onto it, just as meteors can fall to Earth, but it doesn’t pull stuff in.”

Scientists who like the culture of academia and the impact of industry may be interested to know that it is possible to craft a career in AI that spans both, as Joelle Pineau has done. She is a professor of computer science at McGill University and the leader of the Facebook AI Research team in Montreal. “When it comes to working in AI, there is a huge spectrum of positions,” says Pineau, adding that more universities are open to this type of job model.

Bioethicists from McGill University’s Biomedical Ethics Unit published a piece this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine, suggesting that some post-approval clinical trials may even promote the use of ineffective and costly off-label usage.

While the usual number of graduates from McGill's Indigenous Language and Literacy Education program is 20 to 30 students, this year's cohort is 40. Educators say its a sign there's a significant interest in Indigenous languages.